Playwright Jean Anouilh wrote the script for this intense melodrama directed by Jean Grémillon with characteristic virtuosity (see also Gueule d'Amour and Le Ciel Est à Vous, June 19 and 29) and photographed by Philippe Agostini (Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne). Stephen Harvey writes a tantalizing description of Pattes Blanches in “Rediscovering French Film” (notes available at PFA), excerpted here:
“Pattes Blanches' principal characters mate film noir archetypes and the stuff that fairy tales are made of. Fernand Ledoux's pathetic middle-aged lecher, oblivious to the infidelities of his inamorata, is a Gallic variation on one of James M. Cain's cuckolded chumps, and Suzy Delair's garishly over-ripe temptress parades her wares with the deluded aplomb of one who'd spent too many of her formative years watching the collected oeuvre of Viviane Romance. Their spiritual opposites are no less than Cinderella and her Prince Charming, with an unsettling twist - she (Arlette Thomas) is a woebegone hunchback, and he a haunted anachronism, taunted and despised by the local rabble. (Pusillanimous aristocrats were a specialty of Paul Bernard, who'd made a career out of playing like roles in such films as...Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.) On the other hand, Michel Bouquet's disenfranchised avenger anticipates a more recent film icon - this figure of gaunt, melancholoy neurasthenia astonishingly prefigures Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates, mother fixation and all.
“Jean Anouilh's script is a tangled skein of sexual jealousies, intrigues, misalliances, but throughout Pattes Blanches, the themes of eros and problems of social caste are so intertwined as to be indivisible. Sex...is the trigger for the underlying tensions of suppressed class antagonisms...in a milieu where social class is destiny....”

Note: Pattes Blanches repeated July 1.